The Great Emergence National Event

I'm home until the end of the year... but if I was going anywhere, it would be to The Great Emergence National Event:

There are probably as many reasons for gathering in Memphis in December as there are people doing the gathering. For me, however, two things take precedence over the rest.

This is, so far as I know, the first time that emergence Christians and hyphenated Christians, along with some denominational Christians, have sat down together in one place at one time to pray together ... the first time that we have gathered, that is, to seek together the will of God for us as co-operating builders of the Kingdom of God on earth now. Whatever else happens, I pray that the prayers we offer, both together and within our particularities, will be offered humbly, will be received with mercy, and will be answered among us powerfully and incontestably.

Secondly, in all our doing and being and talking, I pray we will remember in every member part of ourselves that when we do this thing, we are enacting a 21st century variation of the story of the Church in the 1st century. Some of us, as Prof. Ray Anderson has so brilliantly shown, will come to Memphis from the posture and understanding of the Church in Jerusalem—of the Inherited Church—and some of us will come to the Memphis Council out of the Antioch tradition of fresh expressions of Church. Some of us will be, within ourselves, a hyphenated bit of both. But it was in the tension between Jerusalem and Antioch that the theology and the ecclesiology of early Christianity found their birthing place. May it be so again in our time and place.

—Phyllis Tickle

Comments

[Stefan Andre Waligur]

Greetings! I am very much looking forward to sharing original music with folks at the Great Emergence Event in Memphis.

Peace,
Stefan Andre Waligur
www.songsofpeace.net
www.speakingofpeace.blogspot.com